How can a celebrity partnership help your brand?

Retailers partnering with celebrities to promote products is a technique as old as celebrities themselves. However, in an era where there is so much advertising and so many companies promoting things through celebrities or influencers, it can be hard to make your collaboration stand out. A good example of a strong campaign is Freeman’s Winter campaign with singer Sophie Ellie-Bextor. As a result of the partnership, Freemans saw its sales increase 13% in the 13 weeks to 20 December 2024. This shows us that a well-timed campaign with a person who fits the brand well can have a huge impact on a brand.

Benefits of celebrity partnerships

The benefits of a celebrity partnership are clear for Freemans, but what benefit does this type of advertising have for brands more broadly. According to Charlotte Ayoub, managing director of TLC Sport, celebrity partnerships allow a brand to extend its network and awareness by leveraging the fanbase and the popularity of the celebrity it chooses to partner with. She also believes that this offers comfort to the general public when buying your products. If the products are endorsed by someone popular or notable, then the public may feel safer about their purchase.

This is a sentiment echoed by Juliette Aiken, CMO at DotDigital, an online marketing company, who believes that a good celebrity partnership can help a brand stand out in this increasingly competitive digital age. She states that this can be particularly effective if you are able to partner with a celebrity with an active fanbase that will always support what the celebrity does like Taylor Swift and the Swifties.

“Whether it’s through celebrity endorsements or influencer collaborations, these partnerships can create cultural relevance and provide a powerful trust signal to consumers. After all, fans don’t just follow celebrities – they form emotional connections with them, and that loyalty extends to the brands they endorse,” Aiken says.

What makes a successful partnership?

If the consensus is that a good celebrity partnership can only help a brand, then what needs to happen to make sure that a partnership is successful. For Aiken it is about making sure you have a clear objective from the start and stick to it. Whether you are trying to create a viral campaign, trying to change the image of your brand or just trying to launch a new product, the end goal of your campaign must be clear and that should guide everything that goes into it.

Outside of the practical things of creating a campaign, Ayoub believes that managing the celebrity and managing expectations are vital to the success of any campaign. She states that many celebrities are often busy and any communication with them usually comes through an agency so it is important to be clear about what you can expect and what you are expected to do in return to avoid misunderstandings and potential conflict later on further down the line.

Communication is something that Freemans believes was important to its successful campaign last year. Freemans CEO Ann Steer states that communication and mutual respect is what makes a successful partnership. She believes it is important that both the company and the celebrity know what the objective of the campaign is. She also believes that making the campaign and the working environment around it fun and engaging also helps as if both sides of the campaign are having fun with it then that authenticity will come through to the customer, helping achieve the objective of the campaign.

Choosing the right person

The main thing when designing a campaign centred around a celebrity partnership is to make sure that the chosen celebrity makes sense for your brand. There’s no point getting David Beckham to promote clothes to teenage girls. When choosing who to partner with it is important to know your target audience, that way you will be able to choose someone who resonates with them.

In the case of Freemans, Sophie Ellis-Bextor was the perfect choice as she appeals to the Freemans customers in a number of ways. According to Steer, the Freemans customer base is women over 40. Therefore, Ellis-Bextor was the perfect fit as she is in this category herself meaning the partnership will instantly be more authentic as you could imagine her wearing clothes from Freemans. Steer states that it also worked because Ellis-Bextor is popular with this demographic as she “captured hearts” during lockdown with her kitchen disco at home and her hit Murder on the Dancefloor was popular at the right time for the demographic. It also lined up well as she had a new single to promote and an album on the way which Freemans was able to use in the advert. Steer states that this partnership was “right person, right time”.

Freemans has again shown that it has a great knowledge of its customer base as it has partnered with Myleene Klass to promote its summer collection which includes swimwear. This is another example of choosing a celebrity that fits the brand. It is another case of Freemans choosing to partner with someone who could plausibly wear its products, but this partnership especially works as Klass is a former swimwear model.

“She looks amazing, she’s in her 40s, she’s got a point of view, obviously she has got a background in swimwear so it is really authentic, and she looks stunning in our swimwear. Our sales are going through the roof on that swim collection and it’s only been out a few days,” Steer explains.

How to measure success?

While celebrity partnerships can be fun for a brand there is no point doing them if they do not offer some kind of return and that can be measured in different ways. For Freemans, success is measured in sales. A good partnership means more people are buying the products advertised. However, this is not the only way to measure the success of a partnership in this day and age. As Aiken explains, there are a number of measurements which could determine the success of a partnership. To start though she does explain that just using impressions to measure success is a flawed way of thinking. While engagement numbers are important there is no correlation between engagement and sales. Lots of people may share a viral campaign with friends and family but may not actually buy anything.

For Aiken a key indicator of success is brand awareness and association. A campaign can be considered a success if there is a spike in branded traffic, press coverage, or social media interactions. It is also important to look at audience sentiment and conversations to see if people are actively talking about the collaboration and whether this conversation aligns with the brand’s messaging and core values.

Ultimately though, it comes back to sales and whether these new conversations are leading to people purchasing the products, whether that be the usual base or a new customer base engaged by a campaign. “At the end of the day, a great collaboration isn’t just about short-term hype – it should build lasting brand affinity that keeps consumers engaged well beyond the campaign,” says Aiken.